WASHINGTON, April 13: A fourth former US army general in less than a month called on the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday to resign over his handling of the war in Iraq.

Retired Major-General John Batiste — who commanded the US 1st Infantry Division in Iraq from 2004 until last year — criticised Mr Rumsfeld’s authoritarian style and called for a ‘fresh start’ at the top of the Pentagon.

The Washington Post reported that the retired soldier had been offered a promotion to three-star rank to return to Iraq, and would have become the second most senior US officer in the country. He declined because he no longer wanted to work under Mr Rumsfeld.

Reports in the US media suggest that while retired generals have taken the unusual step of criticising Mr Rumsfeld publicly, active duty military leaders are equally frustrated with his handling of the war and express their sentiments in private conversation.

The Los Angeles Times reported an ‘intense but largely private debate’ among active duty officers about how best to voice dissent over Bush administration policies.

“It is startling to hear, in private conversations, how widely and deeply the US officer corps despises this secretary of defence,” writes Fred Kaplan in the Slate magazine.

“The joke in some Pentagon circles is that if Mr Rumsfeld were meeting with the service chiefs and commanders and a group of terrorists barged into the room and kidnapped him, not a single general would lift a finger to help him.”

Many US officers who served in Iraq worry that “regardless of flawed war planning or early mistakes by civilian and military officers, the American public would hold the current officer corps responsible for failure in Iraq”, says The New York Times.

President Bush, however, has rejected calls to dismiss Mr Rumsfeld, saying that he was satisfied with his defence secretary’s performance.

“We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork,” Maj-Gen Batiste said.

He told CNN he believed the Bush administration’s handling of the war had violated fundamental military principles such as unity of command and unity of effort.

He said negative feelings among US generals he served with were widespread, and there was almost universal belief that Mr Rumsfeld did not treat military leaders and their opinions with respect.

His comments followed similar attacks by three other retired generals who either served in Iraq or the Middle East.

Last month, Paul Eaton, a former major-general who was in charge of training Iraqi forces until 2004, said Mr Rumsfeld was ‘not competent to lead our armed forces’.

He said the US defence secretary had shown himself ‘incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically’, and was ‘far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq’.

Earlier this month, Anthony Zinni, the commander-in-chief of the US Central Command and in charge of all American troops in the Middle East from 1997 to 2000, joined the calls for changes at the Pentagon.

Mr Zinni said Mr Rumsfeld should resign for a series of disastrous strategic and political mistakes.